fatherzine

The distinction between internal and external variables is interesting in its own right, but both devices are technically robots. A thermostat is also a robot.

We're starting to need gradual words to linguistically orient ourselves: automaton, drone, robot, android, etc. Where "robot" is a narrowing of the technical "feedback loop device".

how is this different than translating user prompts to a different language (eg English => Dutch), retaining the translation and using it for training, while telling the user that he's technically covered under ZRP? article locked for me

Of course recordings are to be used against those that threaten the people in power, while those in power enjoy a cone of silence. Same as it ever was.

Power is silencing other people. Follows from the problem of coordinated action. Foundation of asymmetric law enforcement, a cornerstone of tyranny. Even in a society ostensibly governed by the "rule of law".

What's new is how concentrated the reins of power have become. Paradoxically, could lead to a period of major instability. The year of four emperors.

'you shall have no other gods before me'. operationally, a warning. false worship is dangerous. we get what we worship (value above all, orient towards, optimize for). heaven or hell, read it immanently or transcendentally, personally or collectively. either way, choosing the right worship is paramount.

the conundrum: what is the right objective? puerile attempts, eg "maximize flourishing" or perhaps "minimize suffering" are trivially countered by paperclip machines fulfilling the letter while laying utter waste

'mystery of the person'

given the context, some keywords for orientation: free will, rejection of temptation, the cross

this is the business model bet. the codebase is a big ball of mud that only a superhuman ai can comprehend, therefore everyone must use superhuman ai make changes in the codebase. the selling point is iteration speed, especially early iteration speed

cf. SV conventional wisdom: he who ships first wins the market

in fairness, there is real value in iteration speed. i'm not holding my breath on human comprehensible corporate code bases moving forward. a slew of critical foundational projects, mostly run by the big names, may still care about what used to be called "good engineering practices".

copyright laundering machine. which could poison the very notion of ip / copyright, either open or close source. the only code that can't be laundered becomes code hidden behind a server api

Long term median purchasing power, especially of essentials eg housing / food / energy / education, matters more to the health of a nation than the price of hitech on open global markets at a specific time instant. Furthermore, while the health and wealth of a nation are correlated, they are not the same. I wonder if there is a sensible way to prioritize health over wealth.

First, prices per se are irrelevant. The ratio of labor price to goods&services price is relevant.

Second, the labor / goods&services price ratio itself is irrelevant, as measured in the short term. What is relevant is the long term outlook of this ratio. See eg the Dutch Disease.

Third, even the long term labor / goods&services price ratio is irrelevant. Not everything in this world is, or should be, reducible to simplistic financial value.

One way to approach the underlying intuition is in terms of homeostasis, at nation state level.

"How do you make sure that a hotel room cannot be booked by more than one person at a time" Excellent question! You don't. Instead, assuming a globally consistent transaction ordering, eg Spanner's TrueTime, but any uuid scheme suffices, it becomes a tradeoff between reconciliation latency and perceived unreliability. A room may be booked by several persons at a time, but eventually only one of them will win the reconciliation process.

    A: T.uuid3712[X] = reserve X
    ...
    B: T.uuid6214[X] = reserve X  // eventually loses to A because of uuid ordering
    ...
    A<-T.uuid6214[X]: discard T.uuid6214[X]
    ...
    B<-T.uuid3712[X]: discard T.uuid6214[X], B.notify(cancel T.uuid6214[X])
    -----
    A wins, B discards

The engineering challenge becomes to reduce the reconciliation latency window to something tolerable to users. If the reconciliation latency is small enough, then a blocking API can completely hide the unreliability from users.

life is a game of balance in the sweet band between uninhabitable extremes. technology obeys the same law. both too little, and too much, are deadly.

BigTech, which critically depends on hyper-targeted ads for the lion share of its revenue, is incapable of offering AI model outputs that are plausible given the location / language of the request. The irony.

- request from Ljubljana using Slovenian => white people with high probability

- request from Nairobi using Swahili => black people with high probability

- request from Shenzhen using Mandarin => asian people with high probability

If a specific user is unhappy with the prevailing demographics of the city where they live, give them a few settings to customize their personal output to their heart's content.

The rationalization for injecting bias rests on two core ideas:

A. It is claimed that all perspectives are 'inherently biased'. There is no objective truth. The bias the actor injects is just as valid as another.

B. It is claimed that some perspectives carry an inherent 'harmful bias'. It is the mission of the actor to protect the world from this harm. There is no open definition of what the harm is and how to measure it.

I don't see how we can build a stable democratic society based on these ideas. It is placing too much power in too few hands. He who wields the levers of power, gets to define what biases to underpin the very basis of the social perception of reality, including but not limited to rewriting history to fit his agenda. There are no checks and balances.

Arguably there were never checks and balances, other than market competition. The trouble is that information technology and globalization have produced a hyper-scale society, in which, by Pareto's law, the power is concentrated in the hands of very few, at the helm of a handful global scale behemoths.

<big tech> the building must make $10b/year in revenue, or else you are all fired.